12.

Software Quality
Assurance and Quality
Management

Abdus Sattar
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Daffodil International University
Email: abdus.cse@diu.edu.bd
 Discussion Topics
Software Quality Assurance
What are SQA, SQP, SQC, and SQM?
Elements of Software Quality Assurance
SQA Tasks, Goals, And Metrics
Quality Management and Software Development
QA Vs QC
Reviews and Inspections
An Inspection Checklist
 Software Quality Assurance
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is a set of activities
for ensuring quality in software engineering processes. It
ensures that developed software meets and complies with
the defined or standardized quality specifications.
SQA is an ongoing process within the Software
Development Life Cycle (SDLC) that routinely checks the
developed software to ensure it meets the desired quality
measures.
The implication for software is that many different
constituencies he implication for software is that many
different constituencies
What are SQA, SQP, SQC, and SQM?

 Software Quality Assurance – establishment of

network of organizational procedures and standards
leading to high-quality software
 Software Quality Planning – selection of appropriate
procedures and standards from this framework and
adaptation of these to specific software project
 Software Quality Control – definition and enactment of
processes that ensure that project quality procedures and
standards are being followed by the software
development team
 Software Quality Metrics – collecting and analyzing
quality data to predict and control quality of the software
product being developed
 Elements of Software Quality Assurance
 Standards. The IEEE, ISO, and other standards organizations have
produced a broad array of software engineering standards and related
documents.
 Reviews and audits. Technical reviews are a quality control activity
performed by software engineers for software engineers.
 Testing. Software testing is a quality control function that has one
primary goal—to find errors.
 Error/defect collection and analysis. The only way to improve is to
measure how you’re doing. SQA collects and analyzes error and defect
data to better understand how errors are introduced and what software
engineering activities are best suited to eliminating them.
 Change management. Change is one of the most disruptive aspects of
any software project. If it is not properly managed, change can lead to
confusion, and confusion almost always leads to poor quality.
 Education. Every software organization wants to improve its software
engineering practices. A key contributor to improvement is education of
software engineers, their managers, and other stakeholders.
 Elements of Software Quality Assurance(Cont…)

 Vendor management. Three categories of software are acquired

from external software vendors—shrink-wrapped packages (e.g.,
Microsoft Office), that is custom tailored to the needs of a purchaser,
and contracted software that is custom designed and constructed
from specifications provided by the customer organization.
 Security management. With the increase in cyber crime and new
government regulations regarding privacy, every software
organization should institute policies that protect data at all levels,
establish firewall protection for WebApps, and ensure that software
has not been tampered with internally. SQA ensures that appropriate
process and technology are used to achieve software security.
 Safety. SQA may be responsible for assessing the impact of software
failure and for initiating those steps required to reduce risk.
 Risk management. Risk management activities are properly
conducted and that risk-related contingency plans have been
established
SQA Tasks, Goals, And Metrics
 Quality Management and
Software Development

 Quality management provides an independent check on the software development process.

 The quality management process checks the project deliverables to ensure that they are
consistent with organizational standards and goals.
 QA team should be independent from the development team so that they can take an
objective view of the software. This allows them to report on software quality without being
influenced by software development issues.
 Quality Management
 The terms ‘quality assurance’ and ‘quality control’ are widely used in
manufacturing industry.
 Quality Assurance (QA) is the definition of processes and standards
that should lead to high-quality products and the introduction of quality
processes into the manufacturing process.
 Quality Control(QC) is the application of these quality processes to
weed out products that are not of the required level of quality.
 Reviews and Inspections
 Reviews and inspections are QA activities that check the quality of project deliverables.
This involves examining the software, its documentation and records of the process to
discover errors and omissions and to see if quality standards have been followed.
 During a review, a group of people examine the software and its associated
documentation, looking for potential problems and non-conformance with standards.
The review team makes informed judgments about the level of quality of a system or
project deliverable. Project managers may then use these assessments to make planning
decisions and allocate resources to the development process.
 Program inspections are ‘peer reviews’ where team members collaborate to find bugs
in the program that is being developed.
 Program inspections involve team members from different backgrounds who make a
careful, line-by-line review of the program source code. They look for defects and
problems and describe these at an inspection meeting. Defects may be logical errors,
anomalies in the code that might indicate an erroneous condition or features that have
been omitted from the code. The review team examines the design models or the
program code in detail and highlights anomalies and problems for repair.
 During an inspection, a checklist of common programming errors is often used to focus
the search for bugs. This checklist may be based on examples from books or from
knowledge of defects that are common in a particular application domain.
An Inspection Checklist
References:
1. Software Engineering A practitioner’s
Approach
by Roger S. Pressman, 7th edition, McGraw Hill, 2010.
2. Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville,
9th edition, Addison-Wesley, 2011